ORAL HISTORIES OF SOUTHERN AFRICA

Kingdoms and Chiefdoms of Southeastern Africa: Oral Traditions and Histories, 1400-1830 . By Elizabeth A. Eldredge . Rochester, NY : University of Rochester Press , 2015. Pp. xi + 438. $99.00, hardback (ISBN 978-1-58406-514-4 ). This book is a serious but flawed work of scholarship, undertaken by an experienced specialist historian. Elizabeth Eldredge has divided up the early political history of southeastern Africa into a generous 13 chapters on chiefly (or tribal) history, the history that led up to the big states of the nineteenth century (she stops at 1830). Her terrain is mostly southern Africa, east of the Kalahari Desert.